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Morton Marcus: He said: Take it out in vile whiskey, take it out in lifting your skirts to show your silken crotches; it is this that is intended. You are it. Your pleas will always be denied. You too

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will always go up with the two guys, scapegoats to save the Republic and especially the State of Massachusetts. The Governor says so and you ain't supposed to ask for details. He said:

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Beat hell out of it Beautiful Thing spotless cap and crust white straps over the dark ripple cloth -- lift the stick above that easy head where you sit by the ivied church, one arm buttressing you long fingers spread out among the clear grass

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prongs -- and drive it down Beautiful Thing that your caressing body kiss and kiss again that holy lawn. His name was William Carlos Williams. He was born on this day 1883, one hundred and three years ago. And he is, I think,

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with very little doubt the most influential and most important American poet of the 20th century. He is the subject on his hundred and third birthday of today's Poetry Show. You can probably recognize in that discordant piece called

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July 4th by Charles Ives, favorite and famous nationalistic American melodies, it is fitting that that is the music we begin today's show with because William Carlos Williams was first and foremost an American. His poetic, his

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belief, is based on what America is, what it has become, and what its potential was in his eyes. William Carlos Williams was born September 17th, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey. Most of his life he spent between Rutherford and Passaic, New

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Jersey and crossing over the river to New York City, though he did travel in Europe. His concern throughout his life was coming to grips with the American soil, with American history. And in his search he laid down various dictates for

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American poets and for American artists, which have been picked up within the last thirty years and made tantamount to rules of behavior and rules of belief. I'm sure that you've heard me refer to him many, many times. And I'm sure that you've read

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some of his poetry or heard people talk about him. Today, we will read many of his poems, and I hope that you will become as enthusiastic about them, and what he did, as I am. Well, William Carlos Williams, like so many Americans begins

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his life actually by having a father who circled and lived for a long time in the Caribbean, though he was a hard headed Yankee, and a mother who was Puerto Rican, aristocratic Puerto Rican. And she, very simply, could not come to grips

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with the world around her. And so it was William Carlos Williams' paternal grandmother, his father's mother, who really raised him. And I would like to read several poems for her now. This is from a poem called, "Dedication for a Plot of

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Ground." Her name was Emily Dickinson Wellcome, his grandmother. And what I want to do in reading this poem is let you hear what William Carlos Williams brings into poetry. Most of his life, he objected to T.S. Eliot. He objected to Eliot

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for two reasons: one, because Eliot, an American from St. Louis went to Britain, became a British citizen, and embraced British and European aesthetic values as well as moral values. To William Carlos Williams, it seemed very important for

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Americans to embrace their own soil and more, to embrace the American language of the street. I have been lucky enough to hear William Carlos Williams read when he made a series of records for the Library of Congress. And it is in that voice that I will

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read these poems today. What is interesting is that the record we have of him reading is done after he had the first of his series, in fact, the second of a series of strokes, which weakened him tremendously, made him forget things, and made him

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speak in a very, very soft, almost childlike voice. His poems were very strong. Throughout his life, William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician. His first responsibility was to his patients, was to the children he

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served, the women he served, and he wrote his poems between patients. He wrote his poems whenever he can take a leave from his work. He was also one of those doctors who believed in serving the poor and never made very much money. I've been to

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his house, and it is a brownstone; old, cracked and not very luxurious. Anyway, here is the poem to his paternal grandmother who raised him and you get the spirit of the tough doctor, which he was, the man trying to embrace the voicebox

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of America, which would influence so many people from Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, you name the poets who have been writing in the past thirty-five years and they owe something to William Carlos Williams.

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DEDICATION FOR A PLOT OF GROUND This plot of ground facing the waters of this inlet is dedicated to the living presence of Emily Dickinson Wellcome who was born in England; married; lost her husband and with her

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five year old son sailed from New York in a two-master; was driven to the Azores; ran adrift on Fire Island shoal, met her second husband in a Brooklyn boarding house, went with him to Puerto Rico bore three more children, lost her second

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husband, lived hard for eight years in St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, San Domingo, follow the oldest son to New York, lost her daughter, lost her "baby," seized the two boys of the oldest son by the second marriage mothered them -- they

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being motherless -- fought for them against the other grandmother in the aunts, brought them here summer after summer, defended herself here against thieves, storms, sun, fire, against flies, against girls that came smelling about,

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against drought, against weeds, storm-tides, neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens, against the weakness of her own hands, against the growing strength of the boys, against wind, against the stones, against trespassers, against rents, against her own

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mind. She grubbed this earth with her own hands, domineered over this grass plot, blackguarded her oldest son into buying it, lived here fifteen years, attained a final loneliness and --

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If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out. Here he is, at the end of a long poem called, "January Morning," in which he describes many different things of his trip

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from New Jersey to New York and back. And he tells why he has given these fourteen short poem descriptions and the reason is that he is writing it for his grandmother, Emily Dickinson Wellcome. And it's a beautiful description of poetry. It's a

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beautiful description of William Carlos Williams' poetry, which tries to snatch the moment in all of its clarity, in all its sensation, and make of it something significant. And this fifteenth poem of:

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JANUARY MORNING, is one of my favorites, for the language, for the imagery, for the sentiment, you name it. And he says about the first fourteen poems: All this was for you, old woman. I wanted to write a poem that

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you would understand, but what good is it to me if you can't understand it? But you gotta try. But- well, you know how the young girls run giggling on Park Avenue after dark when they ought to be home in bed? Well, that's the way it is with me

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somehow. And finally, he writes of her, "The Last Words of My English Grandmother, 1920." He writes this wonderful narrative poem. Williams wrote plays, but more, he wrote many short stories,

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novels, is a master of American prose, especially in the informal style. And you can hear it in this poem called: THE LAST WORDS OF MY ENGLISH GRANDMOTHER, and it's again about Emily Dickinson Wellcome.

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There were some dirty plates and a glass of milk beside her on a small table near the rank, disheveled bed -- wrinkled and nearly blind she lay and snored, rousing with anger in her tones to cry for food. Gimme something to eat -- they're starving me --

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I'm all right -- I won't go to the hospital. No, no, no. Give me something to eat! Let me take you to the hospital, I said and after you are well you can do as you please. She smiled, yes, you do what you please first and I can do what I please -- Oh, oh,

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oh! she cried as the ambulance men lifted out of the stretcher -- is this what you call making me comfortable? By now her mind was clear -- oh you think you're smart you young people, she said, but I'll tell you you don't know anything. Then we

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started. On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, what are all those fuzzy looking things out there? Trees? Well, I'm tired of them and rolled her head away.

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Williams, though he lived in the suburban area of New Jersey, was always interested in nature. And one time after another, you will find wonderful images coming of the natural world around him. He writes poems to different kinds of trees, some of them very,

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very humorous. And though I will not find one of those poems right now, I will be touching on them as we go along and read his poems. Williams was first an imagist along with Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and what the imagist is trying to do really was three

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things: first, they wanted to break the dominance of the very rigid language that was written in verse forms -- that is, iambic pentameter, sonnets, sestinas, things like that. They wanted to write in free verse, they did. They also wanted to

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choose their subjects and they didn't want to be cornered, or in some way encircled or trapped by writing about poetic subjects. They wanted to write the subjects that they wanted, in Williams' case the subjects of everyday life and the

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contemporary world around him. And three, they wanted to build their impressions on clear, usually objective images that would touch the reader and allow them to have the sensation of what life was all about. So listen to some of these

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wonderful little poems of his in which he gives you a sense of the world around him. Here, for example, from that last poem that I read, which was- or two poems ago, "January Morning," is him on the ferry going across the river to New York and he

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looks at himself in the third person. The young doctor is dancing with happiness in the sparkling wind, alone at the prow of the ferry! He notices the curdy barnacles and broken ice crusts left at the ship's base by the low tide

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and thinks of summer and green shell-crusted ledges among the emerald eel-grass. And that kind of absolutely clear description of the world around him is what marks so many of William Carlos Williams

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poems. He describes birds, flowers, trees. Here he tries to define what Nantucket -- which is the old whaling port in Massachusetts, or is it Nantucket, Rhode Island? I'm sorry. And he wants to capture in these images, again, and this

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is a perfect imagist poem, he wants to capture by the selection of images, the whole sense of Puritanism and the Puritan ethic, and how it has informed our minds. He calls the poem simply:

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NANTUCKET Flowers through the window, lavender and yellow, changed by white curtains -- smell of cleanliness -- sunshine of late afternoon -- on the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler

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turned down, by which a key is lying -- and the immaculate white bed. I think you can see how he uses those very clear, precise images in his poems, but he breaks with the imagist rather quickly, as

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do so many of the people who founded the movement even, to bring into imagist poetry a sensibility, a marked intelligence, and a lot of emotions in the images selected. So, what we always have here is the presence of a man who is

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talking to you and who is observing the world around him. Let us read one of my favorite poems of his, which is called, "Danse Russe," and it gives you a sense of what I'm talking about. He has just seen, the night before, a Russian dance

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troupe with his wife, Floss, and with the girl he mentions here, Kathleen, who is a young girl who is taking care of his young son, Bill Jr. And they are asleep now and the sun has risen. And here is certainly one of the poems that goes through

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my mind again and again and again and that I never forget, I always seem to be humming to myself like a hit song. If I when my wife is sleeping, and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping, and the sun is a flame-white disk in silken mists

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above shining trees, if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror, waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely. I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my

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shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn window shades, who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household? Well, he obviously has a sense of humor, and obviously is a

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very strong personality. Here he is talking about his nose and the sense of smell, which is not, and certainly back in 1920 it was not a very proper subject for poetry, but here he is talking about smell, and obviously this becomes very

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symbolic of the kind of person he is: Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed nose of mine! What will you not be smelling? What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose, always indiscriminate, always

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unashamed, and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth beneath them. With what deep thirst we quicken our desires to that rank odor of a passing springtime! Can you not be decent? Can you

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not reserve your ardors for something less unlovely? What girl will care for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways? Must you taste everything? Must you know everything? Must you have a part in everything?

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And that of course, is a reference to his nose which was prominent. He was a very good looking man. And that nose is very, very simply, not only the subject of the poem, but represents the idea of smelling and knowing everything in life.

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Let us hear William Carlos Williams now read a poem called, "The Botticellian Trees." Now again, this is a poem read after the second of his stroke so his voice is not the voice I'm reading in. And this is:

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THE BOTTICELLIAN TREES, or the trees painted by Botticelli as he sees them. The alphabet of the trees is fading in the song of the leaves, the crossing bars of the thin letters that spelled winter

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and the cold have been a illumined with pointed green by the rain and sun, the strict simple principles of straight branches are being modified by pinched out ifs of color, devout conditions the smiles of love --- until the stript sentences

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move as a woman's limbs under cloth and praise from secrecy quick with desire love's ascendancy in summer -- in summer the song sings itself above the muffled words. That was William Carlos Williams reading from his poem, "The

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Botticellian Trees," and as you can hear, the voice though clear, is weak. The recording was recorded in 1954 in William Carlos Williams' home in Rutherford, New Jersey. Well, let's read more of William Carlos Williams' poetry and

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afterwards I will read some prose he wrote called, "In the American Grain," and I will talk about that. Let us leave this first part of the show, though, by reading two poems, one of which shows how he would use and take the world around him, give

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you an image, but then with this intelligence and sensibility give you meaning. Here is the other part of William Carlos Williams. He was married all his life to a woman by the name of Floss, or Flossie, who he loved greatly, and wrote to her one of

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the great confessional love poems in the English language. And that love poem was called, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," and in it he admits to his many affairs and adulteries which from the wonderful biography by Paul Mariani called, "William

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Carlos Williams: A New World Naked," which I would suggest to all listeners who are interested in the poetry I'm reading today. It suggests that she knew that he was having all these affairs left and right. And you can see his sensuality. In fact, this is

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a very unlike most of his poems. This is a very telltale sensuality because it seems steeped in not only sensuality, but in sadism as well. THE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE

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At ten A.M. the young housewife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband's house. I pass solitary in my car. Then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray

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ends of hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf. The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling. Well, the fact that the young housewife is a fallen leaf in

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the imagery and then his car drives over fallen leaves crackling, as though he is breaking their bones is one thing, but that he is smiling certainly gives this poem a very, very strange, sinister sense. Anyway, that is William

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Carlos Williams whose hundred and third birthday is this day, September 17th. He was born in 1883. And I will be back after a short musical break. This is the Poetry Show and this is your host Mort Marcus and

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today we are celebrating the hundred and third birthday of William Carlos Williams. And as we go on, I would like to make some announcements. First of all this Friday at the San Jose State Memorial Chapel that is on the San Jose campus, the

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distinguished poet and translator of East European poetry and my old brother in arms, Charles Simic will be giving a reading. I urge you to come, Charles Simic is one of the most original and unique poets in America. He has won

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several Guggenheim Fellowships. He has also won that very strange and wonderful MacArthur Reward in which suddenly you wake up one day, and you're given two to three to four hundred thousand dollars. And his Selected Poems was one of

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the nominees for this last year's Pulitzer Prize. So that is Charles Simic at 8pm, San Jose State Memorial Chapel, eight o'clock, this Friday, the 19th of September. And I'm going to have a an interview with Charlie. Joe and I will be over

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there and we will record the reading but I will also have time to get an interview with Charlie and we'll have that on a future show. That seems to be, believe it or not, the only announcement for this week. So let us go back to the poems of

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William Carlos Williams. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start to read some of my favorites. There are so many different kinds of poems in William Carlos Williams, here is one from one of his most famous sequence of poems called,

00:29:29.120 - 00:29:46.010

"Spring and All," from around the mid 1920s. He would end his life with another sequence of poems called, "Pictures From Brueghel," which would win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, several months after his death. Here's the first poem from:

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SPRING AND ALL, and I'll read two more from the volume. You can see how he uses contemporary images, selects his subject, and though this is a poem about nature, it is a poem about nature with man in it, and is particular American landscape

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By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue model clouds driven from the northeast – a cold win . Beyond, the waste of broa , muddy fields brown with drie weeds, standing and fall n patches of standing water

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he scattering of tall trees ll along the road the redd sh purplish, forked, upstandi g, twiggy stuff of bushes and sm ll trees with dead, brown le ves under them, leafless vi es -- lifeless in appearance, sl ggish dazed spring approache

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-- they enter the new world nak d, cold, uncertain of all save hat they enter. All about them he cold, familiar wind -- n w the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf one by ne objects are defined -- it q ickens clarity, outline of l

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af, but now the stark dign ty of entrance. Still, the pro ound change has come upon them: ooted, they grip down and beg And here's one of his most famous poems from that same n to awaken.

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sequence, one that has caused critics to create question marks over their heads. I think the imperative of the first line really gives away what this poem is about, it's very short, and it goes:

00:31:39.620 - 00:31:58.490

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. And to me that poem is a poem about the image, about the clarity of seeing things, and the importance of those things

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being in our lives. Here is a note he left for his wife. I mean, poetry does not have to be this big, all important, tall columnar contemplation of the great questions of humanity. A note he left in the icebox and it goes like this:

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THIS IS JUST TO SAY I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast, forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.

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And he liked to observe things. And here again, another portrait of a woman, and he loves women. It's called: A PROLETARIAN PORTRAIT, and he himself considered himself part of the working class. He was serving the working class as the

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doctor to the poor Italians in and around Rutherford and Passaic, New Jersey. A young bareheaded woman in an apron, her hair slicked back, standing on the street, one stockinged foot toeing the

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sidewalk, her shoe in her hand. Looking intently into it she pulls out a paper insole to find the nail that has been hurting her. I'm just going through pages in his Selected Poems which is out

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from New Directions and you can find it in any bookstore, I'm sure. Here is another one of these wonderful little moment, clear image poems. He probably zoomed the typewriter up between patients to get this poem which I call, "The Cat," but he calls:

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POEM As that cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully, then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot.

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And another one of those poems, this is called: BETWEEN WALLS The back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle.

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Or this one called: ON GAY WALLPAPER The gray- I'm sorry. The green-blue ground is ruled with silver lines to say the sun

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is shining. And on this moral sea of grass or dreams lie flowers or baskets of desires. Heaven knows what they are between cerulean shapes laid regularly round. Mat roses and tridentate leaves of gold threes, threes and threes. Three

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roses and three stems the basket floating standing in the horns of blue. Repeating to the ceiling to the windows where the day blows in the scalloped curtains to the sound of rain. I'll just read you the first part of- well maybe I'll read

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the whole thing. This is his: THE TREES, and it's again William Carlos Williams with his tough guy sense of humor looking out at the trees in a storm. The trees -- being trees, thrash and scream, guffaw and curse --

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wholly abandoned damning the race of men. Christ, the bastards haven't even enough sense to stay out in the rain -- they say, wha ha ha, wheeee clacka tacka tacka tacka tacka, wha ha ha ha, knocking knees, buds bursting from each pore

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even the trunk's self putting out leaf heads. Loose desire! We naked cry to you -- "Do what you please." You cannot! Ghosts sapped of strength wailing at the gate heartbreak at the bridgehead -- desire dead in the heart. Haw haw haw haw -- and

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memory broken. Wheee. There were never satyrs never maenads never eagle-headed-gods. These were men from whose hands sprung love bursting the wood -- Trees their companions, a cold wind winterlong in the hollows of our flesh icy with pleasure. No part

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of us remains untouched. Here is a poem about death. And really, this is a poem remembering his father's death and his father's body, but it's also about death, about the fact of death that we cannot get rid

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of. And yet it is life that we should be concerned with. DEATH, and again, listen to this wonderful sense of the American language, not only in choice of words but in diction and certainly in rhythm.

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He's dead, the dog won't have to sleep on his potatoes anymore to keep them from freezing. He's dead the old bastard. He's a bastard because there's nothing legitimate in him anymore. He's dead, he's sick dead. He's a godforsaken curio without any

00:37:55.290 - 00:38:14.400

breath in it. He's nothing at all. He's dead, shrunken up to skin. Put his head on one chair and his feet on another and he'll lie there like an acrobat -- love's beaten. He beat it. That's why he's insufferable -- because he's here needing a

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shave and making love and inside howl of anguish and defeat. He's come out of the man and he's let the man go -- the liar. Dead, his eyes are rolled up out of the light -- a mockery which love cannot touch -- just bury it and hide its face for shame.

00:38:41.350 - 00:38:54.790

Another one of those poems in which he observes people and this is a poem that I certainly go through in all my classes, because it shows one of the things that he was so concerned with. He thought after a while, in fact, by the Twentiess, that

00:38:54.820 - 00:39:12.610

free verse was dull, free verse was boring and did not have the order and discipline that poetry needed. And for the next forty years of his life, he searched for a kind of meter, a kind of new metric that would encompass American poetry. And he found it

00:39:12.610 - 00:39:26.560

in the measure, that is in the line length. He once said, if you don't understand the line length, and that the line length is like a measure of music, and use it that way, you're never going to be a good poet. He also did it with a series usually of

00:39:26.560 - 00:39:44.470

either quatrains or tercets, that means three lines, in which he would vary his meter between three and four beats to a line, usually you have the lines going from three to four lines, three to four beats, so it was variable, he would alternate the

00:39:44.470 - 00:39:57.520

rhythm and the accents in these lines, and he certainly did this after "Paterson" too, after poems that were written towards the end of the 1940s. But here he is playing around with line ending and of course you can't see it, but I can and I will

00:39:57.520 - 00:40:11.440

read how these lines change even though the words are the same, merely because he puts things on different lines, this is called: TO A POOR OLD WOMAN, again, one of these objective poems in which he is looking with compassion and with intelligence

00:40:11.590 - 00:40:27.070

on the world around him. And there are many poems about people that I am not reading. So, realize this is an important part of his poetry. Munching a plum on the street a paper bag of them in her hand.

00:40:28.270 - 00:40:52.420

They taste good to her, they taste good to her. They taste good to her, you can see it by the way she gives herself to the one half sucked out in her hand, comforted, a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air. They taste good to her.

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As you know, most of you, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a poem about the bells, the bells, the bells, the tintinnabulation of the bells. And since that point it is thought that not only can you not write a poem with the word tintinnabulation in it, but you

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better not write a poem about bells. But here is William Carlos Williams and one of my favorite poems of his talking about the Catholic bells on a Sunday morning, the bells from the Catholic Church down the street. And it is beautiful the

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way he gets the music of the bells in here in this very, very human poem about the life around us. Again, it is a celebration, and many of Williams poems are celebration, celebrations of the small everyday things in American life.

00:41:37.750 - 00:41:55.250

THE CATHOLIC BELLS Though I'm no Catholic I listen hard when the bells in the yellow-brick tower of their new church ring down the leaves. Ring in the frost upon them and the death of the flowers, ring

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out the grackle toward the south, the sky darkened by them, ring in the new baby of Mr. And Mrs. Krantz which cannot for the fat of its cheeks open well its eyes, ring out the parrot under its hood jealous of the child, ring in Sunday morning and old

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age which adds as it takes away. Let them ring, only ring! Over the oil painting of a young priest on the church wall advertising last week's Novena to St. Anthony, ring for the lame young man in black with gaunt cheeks and wearing a Derby

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hat, who is hurrying to 11 o'clock Mass (the grapes still hanging to the vines along the nearby Concordia Halle like broken teeth in the head of an old man). Let them ring for the eyes and a ring for the hands and ring for the children of my

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friend who no longer hears them ring, but with a smile and in a low voice speaks of the decisions of her daughter and the proposals and betrayals of her husband's friends. Oh bells ring for the ringing! The beginning and the end of the

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ringing! Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ring! Catholic bells! Here is a poem about Franklin Square, which is a little square with a very small park in it and very similar to the poem about the old lady, and it goes like this:

00:43:48.490 - 00:44:05.260

Instead of the flower of the hawthorn, the spine. The tree is in bloom, the flowers and the leaves together, sheltering the noisy sparrows that give by their intimate indifference, squirrels and pigeons on the sharp-edge lawns, a figure of a

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park. A city, a decadence, a bounty, a tall negress approaching the bench, pursing her old mouth, for what coin? And one of his favorite painters, and he liked many painters, but one of his favorite painters who we will

00:44:22.780 - 00:44:49.090

come to again is the wonderful Flemish poet, Brueghel. And I will read some of the Brueghel poems now, but here's the first one he ever wrote. And very simply, it is a poem about the great picture, the wedding dance called the Kermess, the the

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festival. And he does this with a wonderful sense of line again, and he really tries to get the sound of dance and music into the silence of the poem and it's called: THE DANCE, one of his most famous poems again.

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In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound)

00:45:26.040 - 00:45:45.870

their hips in their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound a bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance in Brueghel's great picture, The

00:45:46.230 - 00:46:02.890

Kermess. Well, William Carlos Williams wrote many important books besides poetry, and though I do not have time to read to you from it, I will read the epigraph to it, what he said

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about it. And I urge you to go down to the bookstores and look for a book of American history, a personal impressionistic American history, in which he- it's really a book of heroes. It is a book that talks about Champlain, Sir Walter Raleigh,

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De Soto, Ponce de Leon, Cortez, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Daniel Boone among others, and gives characterizations of them as representatives of the American spirit. And I think you will be so surprised to find who he

00:46:37.030 - 00:46:56.890

finds wanting as a hero in this group. They are very very vivid, very provocative essays and he says this about them: In these studies I have sought to rename the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles, many of them

00:46:56.890 - 00:47:13.810

inappropriate, under which the true character lies head. In letters and journals, reports of happenings, I have recognized new contours suggested by old words, so that no names were constituted. Thus, where I have found noteworthy stuff, bits of

00:47:13.810 - 00:47:28.840

writing have been copied into the book for the taste of it. Everywhere I have tried to separate out from the original records some flavor of an actual peculiarity, the character denoting shape, which the unique force has given. Now, it will be

00:47:28.840 - 00:47:44.560

the configuration of a man like George Washington, and now a report of the witchcraft trials verbatim, a story of a battle at sea, the odd note there is in it, a letter by Franklin to prospective immigrants. It has been my wish to draw from every

00:47:44.560 - 00:48:02.650

source one thing: the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless, under an old misappellation. And these are essays, certainly one of the essays, "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan," or the destruction of Mexico City,

00:48:02.650 - 00:48:19.450

the city of the Aztecs, that is so beautiful and it's prose style that it has been considered one of the classics of American prose of the 20th century. And it says some very, very startling things. It is William Carlos Williams attempt

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to come to grips with not only American country but the American history of America. I urge you to read it, it's called, "In the American Grain," and it is by again, the subject of today's show, William Carlos Williams.

00:48:37.720 - 00:48:54.670

I will leave by reading one of the pictures from Brueghel. There are so many poems I have left out and I just think more and more- that's what I will read. I will not read a poem from Brueghel. I will read, "The High Bridge Above the Tagus

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River at Toledo," and urge you to pick up his work. Within five minutes, we will have Leon in "The Jazz Kitchen," cooking up some good jazz. I would like to announce that this show has been brought to you in good part by a generous donation from Plaza

00:49:17.440 - 00:49:40.360

Books and Stuff, and that you will have been listening to the Poetry Show. And today's program is on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, who was born this day in 1883. Let me, since we do have some time, let me give you this picture of the

00:49:40.360 - 00:50:02.410

artists at work which is from the pictures of Brueghel and it's a self portrait. And you can hear how clearly he is writing in the late 1950s. And all of these poems on Brueghel, by the way, are about paintings -- The Hunters in the Snow,

00:50:02.620 - 00:50:17.470

Landscape of the Fall of Icarus -- all of which, if you know your art, are very, very famous. The Adoration of the Kings, The Peasant Wedding, Haymaking, The Corn Harvest, which is The Kermess, The Wedding Dance in the Open Air, that's actually

00:50:17.470 - 00:50:31.870

the Kermess. In fact, let's read that one first because here is the one that I read you before in Brueghel's great painting, The Kermess. Here it is around thirty years later, he rewrites the poem this way:

00:50:34.000 - 00:50:52.060

Disciplined by the artist to go around and around, in holiday gear, a riotously gay rabble of peasants and their ample-bottom doxies fills the market square, featured by the women in their starched white headgear, they prance or go openly toward the

00:50:52.060 - 00:51:09.490

woods' edges. Round and around in rough shoes and farm britches, mouths agape, oh yeah! Kicking up their heels. He was very socially committed. He was very concerned with what was happening with the working m n and the poor in this countr

00:51:10.780 - 00:51:30.250

. And he is a force - intellectually, emotionally - to be contended with a d everyone who is interested n poetry and in American poet y should read him, read his pros , his wonderful short storie . Here, I will end and play mo

00:51:30.250 - 00:51:48.970

e of this very strange music y Charles Ives, which I've be n playing, which is from h s holiday songs, discordan , warped, if you will, versions f popular American songs that a e usually played on certa n holidays. I will go out readi

00:51:49.330 - 00:52:09.070

g a poem which goes from youth o old age and therefore represen s William Carlos Williams, part f at least from Spani h extraction. And he translat d from the Spanish and knew t well, and he talks abou

00:52:09.000 - 00:52:24.690

THE HIGH BRIDGE ABOVE THE TAGUS RIVER AT TOLEDO, And he says this: A young man, alone, on the high bridge over the Tagus which was too narrow to allow the sheep driven by the lean, enormous

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dogs, whose hind legs worked slowly on cogs to pass easily. The young man didn't speak the language. Pressed against the parapet either side by the crowding sheep, the relentless pressure of the dogs communicated itself to him also

00:52:42.450 - 00:52:59.520

above the waters in the gorge below. They were hounds to him rather than sheep dogs because of their size and savage appearance, dog tired from the day's work. The stiff jerking movement of the hind legs, the hanging heads at the shepherd's

00:52:59.520 - 00:53:18.960

heels, slowly followed the excited and crowding sheep. The whole flock, the shepherd and the dogs were covered with dust as if they had been all day long on the road. The pace of the sheep slow in the mass, govern the man and the dogs. They were

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approaching the city at nightfall, the long journey completed. In old age they walk in the old man's dreams and still walk in his dreams, peacefully continuing in his verse forever.

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William Carlos Williams, born this day, September 17th, 1883, died March 4th, 1963. This is Mort Marcus, next week Joe troud with new translations of nna Akhmatova, the great ussian poet, and poems by an exciting new poet by the name of

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Mary Oliver. I'll see you in two weeks.